Exponentially faster implementations of Select(H) for fermionic Hamiltonians

Abstract

We present a simple but general framework for constructing quantum circuits that implement the multiply-controlled unitary $\text{Select}(H) \equiv \sum_\ell |\ell\rangle\langle\ell|\otimes H_\ell$, where $H = \sum_\ell H_\ell$ is the Jordan-Wigner transform of an arbitrary second-quantised fermionic Hamiltonian. $\text{Select}(H)$ is one of the main subroutines of several quantum algorithms, including state-of-the-art techniques for Hamiltonian simulation. If each term in the second-quantised Hamiltonian involves at most $k$ spin-orbitals and $k$ is a constant independent of the total number of spin-orbitals $n$ (as is the case for the majority of quantum chemistry and condensed matter models considered in the literature, for which $k$ is typically 2 or 4), our implementation of $\text{Select}(H)$ requires no ancilla qubits and uses $\mathcal{O}(n)$ Clifford+T gates, with the Clifford gates applied in $\mathcal{O}(\log^2 n)$ layers and the $T$ gates in $O(\log n)$ layers. This achieves an exponential improvement in both Clifford- and T-depth over previous work, while maintaining linear gate count and reducing the number of ancillae to zero.